Re: A modest proposal -- We need a patch penguin

Rob Landley
2002-01-30T03:45:27Z

On Tuesday 29 January 2002 08:46 pm, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 08:33:03PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:

> > Of course this still doesn't address the problem of patches going stale
> > if they're not applied for a version or two and something else that goes
> > in breaks them...
>
> If you really want to be a patch penguin then.... just do it.
>
> You don't need specific permission to pick up, update, and maintain
> patches that don't make it into the Linus tree on the first try.

I'm not asking to become a patch penguin, and the various other people who
volunteered early on, though well intentioned, slightly missed my point as
well.

We used to HAVE a patch penguin. "Miscelaneous maintainer", "integration
lieutenant", call the position what you will. His name was Alan Cox. He
recently abdicated the position, which has since gradually been assumed by
Dave Jones. There is serious pressure on Dave Jones's tree to accept the
kind of patches Alan used to (and which Alan is still accepting for 2.4 and
queuing for Marcelo). If Dave continues to put out a tree, he would have to
work fairly hard to avoid becoming Alan Cox's successor.

I was hoping for some sort of indication that if patches DID get into Dave's
tree, it would be a step towards their eventual consideration by Linus. Not
a guarantee of inclusion, of course, but it would be nice to know if
inclusion in Dave's tree would move the patch one step towards Linus, or
would just head down a cul-de-sac and additional fragmentation of the
development process.

I was also trying to point out that there seems to be a recurring role here,
which used to be identified with "just Alan" but has now passed to another
person, while still maintaining a noticeable portion of its character. It
might be nice to recognize it as such.

Also, I was trying to encourage ONE beta tree in order to DISCOURAGE the
fragmented proliferation of version-skewed trees accepting third party
patches that seem to have been cropping up recently. (See the linux weekly
news and kernel traffic links in the original posting that started this whole
thread.) In the absence of an -ac tree to accept patches that show
significant promise but are not ready for Linus and vice versa, patches are
accumulating in multiple trees. This fragments the tester base, and seemed
to me to be a less efficient way than the way things worked before Alan quit.

There seems to have been widespread misinterpretation of these objectives...

> Jeff

Rob